PlayStation 4

Why The New PlayStation Is Totally Mind-Blowing

Well, it looks like Sony is back with a vengeance. Wednesday night, Sony unveiled the PS4 to a drooling internet that, by the end, was screaming “shut up and take my money.” The company killed it. I don’t think anyone could have watched that and not subconsciously reconsidered their rent for November 2013 to make sure they get one of these for themselves and only themselves.

Sure, there were the token awkward moments — is a rehearsed joke during a presentation ever a good idea? — but the ratio of “want” to “do not want” was significant. So first with the specifics: It’s called Playstation 4 (PS4) and not Orbis, after all. That turned out just to be the code name. I guess Sony felt that brand might have been hurt by the PSN hacking scandal, but it’s too valuable to just throw away. Specs-wise, it’s sporting an eight-core AMD CPU, an “enhanced” AMD GPU and 8GB of GDDR RAM with unspecified HD space. An SSD would have been nice, but they’re expensive so it was a smart move to stick with hard drives. That’s easy enough to change later, anyway.

The DualShock 4 controller looks just like the leaked pics, and it has a touch pad between the analog controls. But what you didn’t see in the leaked pics was the new "Share" button and light bar. The PS4 will come with some Kinect-style motion-detection features, and the stereo camera tracks the light bar on the back of the controller to enable more immersive gameplay options.

We didn’t get to see what it looks like, which means that, at this point, it probably looks like Popsicle sticks and balsa wood. But the biggest no-show was the price. I think it’s safe to say that Sony learned its lesson with the PS3, and it won’t be asking for a valued appendage and first-born to experience the PS4’s magic.

Since this was as much about attracting developers as future gamers, Sony spent a lot of time talking about how much easier it is to build PS4 games than PS3 games. Since it knows that the Xbox 360 is comparatively a dream to make games for, it said that the ease of porting from PCs is a huge win for the PS4. So the days of buggy, awful ports of games like Skyrim should be behind us.

Tech specs aside, Sony’s Playstation 4 announcement clearly showed that Sony’s still capableof innovating. Its purchase of the Gaikai cloud gaming company, although only formally announced recently, is the basis of a lot of the PS4’s great features. First, you can start playing games as soon as they start downloading from PSN. I’m guessing that the Gaikai server streams you the playable game while the real copy is downloaded to your machine in the background. That way you’re not waiting two days for your 40GB game. Sony said that game demos would work much the same way — test a full game for a limited time — immediately. OnLive users will know how this works, and it makes a lot of sense — you no longer have to download 4GB of stuff to run a game for five seconds to decide it’s not for you. These streaming features are a really smart move since these games, with all their massive polygon counts and high-res textures, are going to be huge. And I’m sure it’s at the heart of Sony’s backward compatibility. The PS4 is far too different from the PS3 to emulate older games, so streaming your library is a good workaround and Microsoft will need something similar to compete.

Another innovative aspect demoed was the social “Share” button. Dedicated video compression/decompression hardware lets you record and share video of a game while you play, without any interruptions. Sony said that gamers will be able to share games to the extent that you can have someone else play your game with you if you’re stuck in a pinch. It sounded cool, but I also think they just invented a new way of trolling — “Dude, the treasure chest is just at the bottom of this bottomless pit. Oops!”

But the streaming cloud features didn’t end there. Sony also demoed the PS4’s remote play features. You can play games on a Vita streaming directly from the PS4, similar to Nvidia’s streaming platform. I don’t think it’s a killer app but it can’t hurt, I guess.

But, really, we all know it’s about the games — exclusive games. Sony showed off some promising new IP: Knack, which looks a bit like a Ratchet and Clank game meets Transformers. There was a surprise visit from Blizzard, who talked about a joint venture with Sony to bring Diablo 3 with four-player co-op to the PS3 and PS4. But I was really horny for Killzone Shadowfall, which looked ridiculously good. As did Drive Club, its new driving game that is sort of like Gran Turismo + Midnight Racer + crack. There was a new Infamous game, and the Braid creator showed The Witness, a short-term exclusive 3D puzzler that looked promising.

Graphics on the PS4 are beyond incredible. Capcom’s Deep Down, Ubisoft’s Watchdogs, Drive Club and the Quantic Dream demo made Crysis 3 look like Pac- Man. I live and breathe 3D graphics rendering, and my mind was blown. My girlfriend is still picking up bits of brain from our office floor. Oddly, of all the games shown, none mentioned integration of the PS4 controller’s touch pad.

So after such a seriously good demo, Microsoft has its work cut out for it, especially considering the brains behind the original Halo games just demoed Destiny running on its competitor’s hardware — first.